I’ll tell you tomorrow, when I see you….

For those of you who have followed this journey…at least in the last few weeks, I’m sure you can imagine how incredibly sweet those words sounded to me. I spoke to Elie this afternoon and for the first time in almost a month, our conversation was relaxed. He has nothing to do. They are waiting there, hoping that the ceasefire will last…forever.

They are ready to fire – if fired upon. They don’t expect to be, but they are ready. They are also very ready to come home – to sleep in comfortable beds, eat and dress and just be normal. But not yet. Slowly, troops are returning home. I am not part of the upper circles where they decide on the order of standing down from a war. Elie’s unit remains, though many soldiers have already returned home to their families, their jobs, their lives. In some ways, this waiting period is harder than others. They want to finish and be finished.

We talked about what would have been, if they hadn’t been called to war. They were to have gone for training. “Guess you had enough training, right?” I asked Elie.

“and then some,” he answered.

He told me they might give them a week off, as they were planning to do before the war. They might cancel the unit’s vacation – a week where they take the whole group somewhere to relax. There isn’t much time yet before the next rotation and anyway, they all just want to go home. Nearly as much as we want them home.

“Guess what I ate for lunch?” he said at one point.

OK, that’s going to be a bit hard. It had to be something really good…or really bad. But which? Hoping it was something good, I asked “what did you eat?”

“Steak and hamburgers.” OK, that’s about at the top of Elie’s food chain. And then he explained. One of the father’s of a boy in his unit came with a huge truck, a huge refrigerator compartment filled with meat – and made a barbecue for the guys.

“How much weight have you gained in this war?” I asked him and heard him laugh. You can’t imagine how wonderful that sounds.

There were several times he started to say something and stopped. No, he can’t tell me when his unit will move, where it will go. He can’t tell me so many things. We talked a little bit about the rocket fire. Several times they were ordered to quickly take cover.

He told me that his unit is located in a field, and today, for the first time, he saw in the distance that the farmer was beginning to reclaim his land from the army; watering the fields that were open to him. “He can’t even come here,” Elie explained. “This area is a closed military zone.”

I told him about the broadcasts – how in the middle of a discussion, a different announcer would suddenly start talking “on top” of the other voices, “Alert in Beersheva. In Beersheva, an alert. An alert, in Sderot and Ashkelon. Alert in Sderot and Ashkelon. In Ashkelon and Sderot, an alert.”

I told him how I would start to pray each time I heard those words – “let it land in an open field and not in the city; let it land in an open field,” knowing that even as I was thinking those words, the rocket had already landed. And then, I explained to my son, “then I realized YOU were in an open field. Then I started praying for it to land in the city,” I joked and again he laughed.

We talked about his little sister, and the “trauma” of the false alarm here. “Ima, do you know how many times I heard the siren?” he asked. No, I don’t know and I’m not sure I want to know.

“Did anything hit near you?” God, I don’t want to know the answer to that one. Please, please say no.

“No,” he answered. Thank you, God, for that!

He started to say something else, but again stopped. “I’ll tell you tomorrow, when I see you,” he explained and it sounded so good.

This evening for the first time in weeks, I mixed a batch of tuna-corn fritters. My mother made them when we were little; my sister makes them for her kids; I make them for mine. It doesn’t beat steak and hamburgers, but it is something that Elie loves. Actually, I wouldn’t be at all surprised someday to hear from Elie that he only eats them and pretends to like them because he doesn’t want to hurt my feelings…but he, like the rest of my kids, do seem to love them.

So, I made a batch for dinner tonight and will take several with me to give to Elie during the ride home. He can only leave with the other commander gets back. That commander lives along the route where I’ll be traveling to get to Elie, “do you want to ask him if he wants a ride? I can pick him up and bring him straight to where you are so he doesn’t have to take any buses.”

“I’ll check,” Elie said. A few hours later, I spoke to Elie again. “No, you don’t have to get him,” he said. “His father is driving him down.”

That made me feel good. Like the father who drove down and made a barbecue for Elie’s unit, like the father who will drive his son down tomorrow, like my friends here who went this evening to visit their son who was in Gaza and returned, we all need to see, to hug, to talk.

Many years ago, I wanted to help the Israeli army better explain why and how it does what it does. The army website was not well written and lead to misunderstandings and so I worked with a team of people to help improve the quality of the English on the site. After many months and considerable improvement, we decided the group of people would “stand down.”

I liked the term and the concept. You step up to a crisis, you meet it, you deal. I’m not sure I dealt with this war nearly as well as I should have. Many friends (whose sons were in more danger than Elie) handled the war with faith and grace. I don’t think I handled it with either. In some ways, that was good. It let you – those of you outside Israel – see the very real picture of how much we as a society love our sons and how much they love our country.

In some ways, I think I am standing down now. I will continue to write on the blog but it goes back to what it was a month ago, a place to share stories about life in Israel, especially those connected to having a son in the army. For now, though I have little faith this ceasefire will last beyond Hamas‘ ability to rearm, for now, we will sleep; for now, we will enjoy life and go back to whatever passes for normal in this country.

I thought to make a separate post about this, but I’ll include it here. Today, Hamas boasted that they had killed 1,583 Israeli soldiers in this war. Miraculously, according to them – they managed to kill over 700 in a single day. If I had to explain the difference between their society and ours, I could not have done it better than they did themselves. There are no celebrations in Israel today; no great triumphant rallies. We do not celebrate the deaths in Gaza; we regret more than words can express, that Hamas brought this war down on the heads of our people and their own.

It would never occur to us to boast over the numbers of people who died in Gaza…not even those caught with guns and rocket launchers. What the Palestinians refuse to understand is that there are no winners in a war and so they lost, and so did we. There are orphans on both sides of the fence near Gaza, millions of dollars in lost earnings and damaged property. Tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of traumatized children.

What did we gain? In a very real sense, what Israel gained was probably several months of quiet before the next round. Again my youngest daughter told me about the moment when the siren went off. This is a child who remembers everything, and yet, almost every day, she keeps telling me the story as if I had not heard it. “There was a rocket attack in Beersheva,” she said to me today.

“When?” I asked. Today, like yesterday, was quiet.

“A long time ago,” she said.

Tomorrow, Elie will come home. “How are you?” I asked him and got his usual answer.

“Fine.”

He does sound fine, but I’ll know for sure tomorrow, when I see him and finally have a chance to really listen. When I see him tomorrow…

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12 Comments on I’ll tell you tomorrow, when I see you….

Your post is very good. The point about the Hamas bosting and the difference between them and us is SO true! My son is finally being drafted next week. What do parents without cars do, just wait longer??(Carless in Bnai Brak)

Mazel tov on your son’s upcoming Bar Mitzvah. I am happy that Elie will be there with you, hopefully for the entire celebration. Please thank him for his work and dedication in defending our country. Here in the United States, we pray along with you for the safe return of all the soldiers.

Hamas can claim that they killed a million soldier, no one truly believes that. The fact is they are scared and were saved by the US. I pray that they stay quiet, but fear they won’t. Then your Elie and all the Elies of Israel will once again be called to serve.

Thank you, as always, for your clarity, and for sharing your honest emotions. You are a catharsis for me. Rickismom: We tremp and ride buses, silly thing. 🙂 May Hashem keep your dear son safe. May He guide your son to have positive experiences of growth and love for his people and his land. May they all live to be really really old, healthy guys, with good stories to tell their grandchildren.

Agreeing with rutimizrachi, reading your blog is truly cathartic for me. I look at my oldest, who’s still just in 5th grade, and imagine a few years down the road, when he’s heading for his service, picturing him … heading into battle???? I just so can’t wrap my brain around it.

He comes home from school with stories from this one’s brother or that one’s father who are returning home now, and he has nightmares about rockets falling and being unable to reach the shelter/mamad in time … and Sunday, the day of the ‘ceasefire,’ he said, “I’m scared to go into the tzava, ima.” Reminding him he still has to get through elementary school and reach bar mitzva age doesn’t help either one of us.

Your posts help me focus on what’s at the center of it.

Thank you so much.

Praying for Mashiakh to show up NOW, so my big little boy won’t have to stress about being in the tzava for the next seven years … and nobody else in this crazy country will, either.

A beautiful post. There is something so wonderful when we can embrace the gifts of life, even as we know that there will be another round of grief and stress. I pray you will have a long rest and that you will fully enjoy your times together again as a family. There can be no rejoicing over war in hearts that love humanity.Thank you for writing.

Baruch Haba. Thank you for your inspirational words and your honest heartfelt coverage of this war. As a mother of three little ones in America, I read your blog nightly before saying tehillim for the soldiers. Your writing helped me focus my prayers and think about all of the lives being personally affected by this war. Thank you to you and your son.

We are a democratic country; so much so, we allow our enemies into our government and from the podium of our parliament, they have the freedom to call for policies that would destroy us.
Our current enemies, those who pose the most immediate threat lie to our north. This is Hizbollah land, where according to their leader Hassan Nasrallah, “We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.”
Our enemies lie to the northeast. This is Syria. My sons have spent many months on the Golan Heights, including some tense days waiting to see how the Syrians would react after Israel sent planes to destroy a building widely believed to be the beginnings of a nuclear reactor. My oldest son fought near Gaza to help stop the rockets from being fired against Israel.
Our enemies lie further to the east. This is Iran, led by fanatics who promise that they will do all they can to accomplish in a few minutes more than what Adolf Hitler accomplished in six years of war. The Iranian leadership has made it clear in words and actions that they are after a nuclear bomb and that their goal is to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Believe them.